New Zealand Day 4 2016

My first full day in New Zealand!

This was to be a mellow day. I ended up getting up quite early! I know amazing. Well not really, with the time change 6am is like noon. So I ended up getting out a just walking around the neighborhood. Walking is really nice in so many ways. It's slow, and allows you to really see things. You have the time to ponder. The neighborhood reminds me of something you might see out east. The streets are narrow with winding roads. One of the things that really struck me was the architecture. Houses are smaller, but better much better designs. I know what it is. There are no housing developments. You know 5 designs for 500 homes. All cookie cutter. Yuck. These all seem to be individually designed, and much more in tune with the environment that they are placed.

We started off going to an area called the restart. So after the big earthquake in downtown Christchurch. Many of the buildings if not collapsed were condemned. So what do you do? Well they brought in shipping containers, and made a big sort of outdoor mall out of them! Oh they also painted them very bright contrasting colors. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but most of the condemned buildings also have very colorful graffiti on them. It seemed like they were taking this depressing situation. It's been over 5 years and there still rebuilding! So they are alleviating this depression with COLOR! I thought it was cool.

So we moved on to the botanical gardens and park. Here is another interesting difference. There are parks all over Christchurch and people use them! There not empty or full of druggies. I mean here in the U.S. Parks seem to be used primarily by druggies or homeless people. All sorts of things are going on in the parks. People just hanging out relaxing, or playing games. People had brought chairs and little coolers, they were going to be there for a while. They weren't just taking a break while they were walking through. Here in Christchurch the houses are smaller, so people extend out to the parks.

Being in the big botanical garden and park area, you notice something. It's as if everyone in the U.S. just stopped what they were doing closed their eyes and took a long deep breath. That sort of buy, buy, buy, work, work, work buzz is gone. This underlying societal push to be a good worker, so that you can in turn be a good consumer. Got to keep up with the Joneses. Got to always compare you self to your neighbor. Is your car better? How about the house? It just doesn't seem to be there. Or it's not nearly as noticeable and prevalent.

So we meandered through the botanical gardens. The trees and the different kind of tress were very interesting. One of the benefits of visiting in the fall was that the leaves were changing. Not so good for looking at the rose gardens, but the trees were colorful. In one of the inside venues they had a Chrysanthemum show. It's one of those things that you might think to be boring, but it was really fascinating and the colors and complicated structure of the plants kept it interesting.

One of the interesting things I got from walking around was the visibility of the war memorials. I didn't really know what to make of them at first. Where they there to glorify the wars? Prevent future wars? I think to understand it a little better you have to realize what a huge sacrifice it was for New Zealand to send troops for something like World War II. It killed 1 in for every 150 New Zealanders. That would be the equivalent of 1.6 million Americans! So it was real strain and sacrifice, for a small country to send troops. New Zealand was involved for all but three of the 2179 days of the war — a commitment on a par only with Britain and Australia.